NASA Offers $5000 a Month For You to Lie in Bed

tracer818 writes "In order to study a person as if they were in space without gravity, NASA scientists are paying subjects $17,000 to stay in bed for 90 straight days. The study will follow the Bed Rest Project standard model and be conducted at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. Participants will live in a special research unit for the entire study and be fed a carefully controlled diet."

I'm in.

Can I bring a friend? In all seriousness, what if you need to rub one out?

Re:I'm in.

what if you need to rub one out?

Is that the latest 'hood slang for masturbation? Genuine question.

Re:I'm in.

I can't believe I researched this. It goes back at least 15 years. I tried searching in Google Books & IMDB quotes as well, but the only citations prior to 1993 were in different contexts.

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.beer/browse_frm/thread/66eb379b321b2433/11e668a230018072?lnk=st&q=%22rub+one+out%22#11e668a230018072 [google.com]
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.tasteless.jokes/browse_frm/thread/1299b8d6d59e0f1e/45022260920fd617?lnk=st&q=%22rub+one+out%22#45022260920fd617 [google.com]

Re:I'm in.

For those of you still stuck in 1993 and looking to update to the current vernacular, let me be of assistance and offer the following:

"Wax the Buick"
"Shake hands with Ben Franklin"
Or, my personal favorite, "Grease the Jesus"

Re:I'm in.

You think they are paying people just to watch them sleep? I assume that them watching you rub one out is part of the payment. I also assume they will stream the webcam watching you onto the internet to recoup their losses during these periods.

Re:I'm in.

GEORGE: (Vowing) Well, I'll tell you this, though - I am never doing.. that , again.
ELAINE: What, you mean, in your mother's house, or all together?
GEORGE: (Definite) All together.
(The next three lines are said at the exact same time)
ELAINE: Oh, gimme a break..
JERRY: (Skeptical) Ohhh yeah.. right.
KRAMER: Oh, like you're gonna stop?
JERRY AND ELAINE: C'mon..
GEORGE: You don't think I can?
JERRY: No chance.
GEORGE: (Daring) You think you could?
JERRY: Well, I know I could hold out longer than you.
GEORGE: Care to make it interesting?
JERRY: Sure, how much?
GEORGE: A hundred dollars.
JERRY: (Pointing) You're on.
KRAMER: (Butting in) Wait a second, wait a second. Count me in on this. (Clicks his tongue)
JERRY: You?
KRAMER: Yeah.
JERRY: You'll be out before we get the check.
ELAINE: (Smiling) I want to be in on this, too.
GEORGE AND JERRY: (Rejecting) Ohh, no. No, no, no..
ELAINE: Why?
JERRY: (Showing difference) It's apples and oranges..
ELAINE: What? Why? (More 'no, no, no's from Jerry and George. Persistent) Why?
JERRY: Because you're a woman!
ELAINE: So what?
JERRY: It's easier for a woman not to do it than a man.
ELAINE: (Sarcastic) Oh.
JERRY: We have to do it. It's part of our lifestyle. It's like, uh.. shaving.
ELAINE: Oh, that is such bologna. I shave my legs.
KRAMER: (Making a point) Not everyday.
GEORGE: Alright, look, you want to be in?
ELAINE: Yeah!
GEORGE: You gotta give us odds. At least two to one - you gotta put up two-hundred dollars.
KRAMER: No, a thousand!
ELAINE: No, I'll - I'll put up one-fifty.
GEORGE: Alright, you're in for one-fifty.
JERRY: (Nodding) Okay, one-fifty.

I lie in bed all the time

I lie in bed all the time:
"Yes, I love you"
"Yes, it was good"
"No, I was not thinking about _her_"

Re:I lie in bed all the time

You bring new meaning to the phrase "Talk to the hand".

Details

Is there a retroactive program?

What's that movie?

The one with Martin Sheen in it and they keep sending the soldiers into nuclear fallout to test whether or not they can advance to ground zero.. oh yeah, that's right Nightbreaker [imdb.com]. How many times exactly does NASA need to study the effect of weightlessness? It's bad, ok? Long term exposure to "micro-gravity" causes not too nice symptoms. Great, move on. NASA never seems to approach anything as a problem that needs to be overcome - or at least they haven't since the '60s. Problem: without some form of gravity, long term space flight is bad for humans. Solution: provide some form of gravity. There's two that readily come to mind; either accelerate the vehicle at 9.8m/s/s or make the vehicle big enough so that you can spin it and not get dizzy. The first uses up way too much energy and just isn't an option at the moment. The second is so damn obvious that Von Braun was talking about it in the '40s. But it has never been done.

Re:What's that movie?

Look, you know and I know that NASA has probably got better things to do than pay some labrats to learn how to eat, piss, and shit sitting down. The effects are, as you say, well known and obvious to anyone who has ever studied space travel and microgravity environments. Muscular atrophy, loss of balance, and other problems are well known.

But the department needs to spend its budget or else face cuts next year. With Obama already looking for ways to divert NASA funds into edumacation, the need is dire and if NASA engineers and scientists can't be busy, at least they can look busy.

I get paid a lot of money to do what I do. But sometimes I just sit around and stare at the monitor and space out. In order to not look like I'm wasting time, I run a Perl script in a command window that prints the text of random files on the filesystem until I stop it. It makes me look like I'm waiting for a compile to finish, and that's enough to keep me in the green.

Re:What's that movie?

make the vehicle big enough so that you can spin it and not get dizzy. [..] so damn obvious that Von Braun was talking about it in the '40s. But it has never been done.

Actually something like that was done on skylab. You don't need to spin the spacecraft. You just need a cylindrical track which you can run around. It works very well.

Re:What's that movie?

Actually, on a more serious note, I saw something like this on Discovery (or NatGeo, I can't remember). The purpose of the study wasn't just to observe patients suffering from bed sores and blood clots. They were subjected to 2 minute exercise regimens every day which were designed to keep them in good physical health even though the rest of the day they were bedridden. The goal was to create exercise devices that could be used quickly and simply without the need for gravity that would provide enough exercise to replace the amount we normally perform here on Earth.

It looked pretty grueling, even if only for 2 minutes a day.

Deeper understanding

How much artificial gravity do you need? 1.0 G? 0.2 G?

Will some experimental drugs help counteract the effects of weightlessness?

Can the problems be alleviated with specific exercises during weightlessness?

How long will it take to recover after returning to gravity? If an astronaut is weightless on a trip to Mars, can he be back up in a week or a month?

If you want to treat something as a problem to overcome, you might need to know more than "It's bad", ok?

2001: A Space Odyssey

Is it just me or did anyone else imagine a test subject waking up one day to see a big black monolith standing at the foot of his bed?

Bedpan or Catheter?

I think it makes a world of difference in considering the "opportunity".

ESA Has Done Studies Long Ago

The US is very badly lagging in the international bed rest race! I thought I read somewhere about the ESA doing this two years ago [esa.int] for female astronauts at least. There's some interesting comments on their WISE page [esa.int] such as:

All volunteers were surprised how fast the time passed by.

I'll bet that month you spend in bed is completely lost with little or no memories for it.

And if you really want to know more, they published all their findings for all their experiments in five hefty PDFs [esa.int].

To do today:

Things to do today:

Find out if NASA will let me have a laptop in that bed.
Find out if my boss will let me telecommute for the next 90 days.

Re:You forgot...

Do they have cable/satellite

I am sure the have satellites

And then...?

Will they also pay to rehabilitate you and your degenerated muscles afterwards?

Re:And then...?

That was my first thought. Then there's the worry of blood clots and bed sores. Being bed bound is not as fun as people think and only for 17K? Your medical bills will be higher to fix all this messes up.

They should call up Blizzard

and do a cross promotion, in particular concentrate on World of Warcraft players. With Season 4 PvP gear coming down these people will have lots of reason to spend all their time in one place

USSR did this too.

There was a similar research program in the USSR - subjects lied on bed for 6 months without moving.

As far as I remember, one subject broke his femur when he tried to stand for the first time after the test. Also, all subjects experienced frequent orthostatic collapses (i.e. they fainted then they tried to stand up).

The damage was quickly corrected by using calcium gluconate injections and physical therapy.

Alas, I can't find a source for this in English.

Re:Learned To Do that in College

You can lie all you want, I'm pretty sure Rosey knows you're seeing other hands.

Re:Paying People To Lie in Bed

I'm not against it for the truly needy, but it is commonly abused. The government is paying some people to sit around and watch Oprah. Welfare shouldn't be used to promote a lifestyle of laziness for those who could work.

Ok, let me have a Take #2:
The government's been doing that for people for years. They're called federal employees.